S1E4 - Aine on Isolation, Loneliness, and COVID-19

The Jane Addams Collective can be found online at https://janeaddamscollective.org/

The full text of the book Mutual Aid, Trauma, and Resiliency can be found online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-jane-addams-collective-mutual-aid-trauma-and-resiliency

A transcription of the episode, provided by a comrade who desires to see more accessible anarchist content:

S01E04 Aine on Isolation, Loneliness and COVID-19 Live Like The World Is Dying

0:00.0# (Introductory music)

0:16.8# Margaret Killjoy: Hello and welcome to Live Like The World Is Dying, the podcast that focuses on, well, what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy. This week I'm talking with Aine, a member of the Jane Addams Collective out of New York city. The Jane Adams Collective is an anarchist collective that works on mental health issues. It's mostly mental health professionals who work on... Basically developing forms of self-therapy and... That are applicable to when people don't have access to traditional therapy or don't want the hierarchical model of traditional therapy. They also have done a lot of work and written a short book about mutual aid and trauma and basically the... How trauma comes up in disaster situations and what we can do about it. So I'm very excited to have Aine on the podcast. I know I promised that this week I was going to talk to a friend of mine who just came back from the autonomous regions of... Northern Syria and I have that interview done but I feel like this particular one needs to go up as soon as possible. One result of my own self-isolation is that I don't have access to my usual recording space. I actually live off-grid without real internet and without electricity so sometimes I have limited access to certain things and the place I normally record has someone living there who can't really have people over right now. So I apologize in advance for the audio quality of the interview. But I think it's absolutely worth hearing anyway and I... I hope you enjoy it.

2:00.0# Margaret: Before the interview gets started, I just wanna say a few words on my own about mutual aid and this particular crisis. I think that one of the things that we're watching happen is the failure of national-level governments to keep us safe but an incredible amount of work done both on the international level and at the local level to... And on the individual level to try and keep each other safe during... During this crisis. And I think in a lot of ways that's a natural pre-figuration of what society probably should look like where... Experts on an international level are able to advise local infrastructure about how best to act without actually having the power at the top. Instead having the power at the bottom, we can keep each other safe. And the other thing I wanna say is that... I'm... I'm cooped up right now but a lot of people aren't. A lot of people are out there working their jobs either because they have some shit service class work job where their boss won't... Shut down the cafe and during a pandemic, or people are out there working at day shelters for homeless people, or working in health or delivering food or working in the other... Essential things that... That we need in order to stay safe as a society. And not only does my heart and... My heart go out to people who are doing that work, but I also want to suggest that in a society that we hope to build, hopefully that most dangerous work, that front line work is something that people can cycle through. People can come in and out of. This isn't... Really my own idea, this is coming from someone I care about who... Works at a day shelter and realizes that people will die if they stop going to work. So they still go to work. But it is an awful lot to deal with right now and I hope that whatever happens, none of us really know what's going to happen, I hope that we're able to, not just cheer on people who are doing that kind of work, but figure out how some of us who are capable can step up and take some of the burden off of those people and maybe cycle people in and out of certain tasks. I don't know, something to think about. Maybe I'm completely off base, I don't know. But anyway, here's the interview and I hope you get as much out of it as I did.

4:39.4# (Musical transition)

4:52.2# Margaret: So, welcome to the podcast. If you want to introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and any political or organizational affiliations that you want to mention.

5:04.7# Aine: Yeah, my name is Aine. She/her. I am an anarchist and I've... I'm in Jane Addams... the Jane Addams Collective. It's a radical anarchist mental health collective that's been around about five years. I do a few other things and do work out of the base in Brooklyn as well.

5:26.7# Margaret: Okay. Do you want to... So I... I put out a call to try and find basically... Anarchist or radical mental health professionals to talk about... What's been going on right now in terms of... I know myself, I know I've been practicing social distancing for a couple weeks already and obviously the number people doing that have... Has just been going up. And of course that is a... Even for an introvert like me, not the easiest thing in the... In this world. And so... I guess I wanted to talk to you about that. About the effects of social distancing and how we can manage them.

6:09.7# Aine: Absolutely. And that's particularly important considering we're already sort of behind in terms isolation. There's been a growing loneliness epidemic in the last... Few years. Partly due to capitalism but due to other things as well, that's sort of... Set us at an off footing here. Like people have fewer friends and reliable social connections than they used to do in a lot of meaningful ways. Often through no fault of their own but it... The social distancing probably feels more onerous when there's already a lack of genuine social connection. And the anxiety that... The virus, while also very scary and a problem, is... A face for people's anxiety about other existing collapse in their own lives as well. And it's a very notable and present face. So it's really easy to think of that one thing as the problem when it's showing the inefficiencies and the breakages in centralization and hierarchical responses to things.

7:15.2# Margaret: So what do we do about it? So what do we do... For someone who's listening to this podcast who... Is going to be practicing social distancing? I guess what I want to talk to you a little bit about that and then I also wanna talk to you about people who have to... Who aren't able to practice social distancing. People who... Do social work or healthcare work or... Just basically... Are continuing to be in high-risk situations. About how to manage that kind of fear and anxiety. But I want to start maybe with... With the social distancing aspect.

7:52.8# Aine: Absolutely. In all of the... Obviously the necessity of having... Reducing the risk collectively for communities spread of the... Of COVID-19 is pretty reasonable. A lot of the social things that one would do to try to maintain their sanity in a stressful time of any sort apply pretty broadly here. Trying to actively maintain, at least virtually, the connections you have. It's very easy to get into an "out of sight, out of mind" sort of a thing when you're alone... And especially when you're lonely. And that sort of perpetuates itself, so even if you're making a point of reaching out to, "Who do I know around here, who do I know who might be doing same thing." And since you're not physically able to be around people if you're doing the ultimate version of the isolation